Site Mobile Navigation

Experts Dispute Bush on Gay-Adoption Issue

Are children worse off being raised by gay or lesbian couples than by heterosexual parents?

Responding on Thursday to a question about gay adoption, President Bush suggested that they were.

"Studies have shown," Mr. Bush said in an interview with The New York Times, "that the ideal is where a child is raised in a married family with a man and a woman."

But experts say there is no scientific evidence that children raised by gay couples do any worse -- socially, academically or emotionally -- than their peers raised in more traditional households.

The experts, who cross the political spectrum, say studies have shown that on average, children raised by two married heterosexual parents fare better on a number of measures, including school performance, than those raised by single parents or by parents who are living together but are unmarried.

But, said Dr. Judith Stacey, a professor of sociology at New York University, "there is not a single legitimate scholar out there who argues that growing up with gay parents is somehow bad for children."

Dr. Stacey, who published a critical review of studies on the subject in 2001 and has argued in favor of allowing adoption by gays, added, "The debate among scientists is all about how good the studies we have really are."

Since 1980, researchers have published about 25 studies comparing children from same-sex households with peers in traditional families, using measures of social adjustment, school performance, mental health and emotional resilience. Some of the studies have focused on elementary-school children, others on those not quite teenagers, a few on adolescents; a handful have followed children for years. Uniformly, the authors have reported that there are no significant developmental differences between the two groups of children.

Yet the field is still highly controversial, in part because the research on gay households with children has so far tended to be small; usually no more than a couple of dozen families have been involved.

"You can't force families to participate, and there aren't that many of them out there to start with," said Dr. J. Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University who has studied gay men raising boys.

"There is also a strong volunteer bias: the families who want to participate might be much more open about sexual orientation" and eager to report positive outcomes, Dr. Bailey said.

Critics of the studies have more often charged that it is the researchers who are biased, failing to probe aggressively enough to find differences.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

"In many of these studies, they simply aren't asking hard questions," said Lynn Wardle, a law professor at Brigham Young University who has agued against adoption by gay couples.

The researchers, Professor Wardle said, ask the families about the children's self-esteem, "about whether they have friends -- soft and fuzzy questions -- but not about sexual behavior, sexually transmitted disease and drug use."

Dr. Stacey said one small survey of people raised in lesbian households, published in the late 1990's, did pointedly address sexual development and identity. In it, she said, two English researchers reported that of 30 young adults raised by lesbian parents, 6 had had a gay sexual relationship by the time they reached their 20's.

She added that other small studies had also suggested that children raised in same-sex families might be more open in their attitudes toward gay relationships, if not gay themselves.

"To me, it is plausible that their attitudes toward homosexuality would be more open, but here again the studies are not large enough to say anything for certain," she said, adding that a vast majority of these children grow up to be heterosexual.

A more reliable finding, Dr. Stacey said, is that children in same-sex families tend to be more communicative with their parents.

One undisputed reality for children raised by gay parents is that they tend to face teasing, discrimination and bullying in the schoolyard because of who their parents are. That many of these children can navigate such nastiness, on top of the usual social and emotional squalls of growing up, and still be found as well adjusted as their peers on standard psychological tests is remarkable in itself, some researchers say.

As the political debate over same-sex parents becomes more contentious, the quality of the research appears to be getting better, some social scientists say. Last month psychologists at the University of Virginia and the University of Arizona published a study of 44 adolescents from all over the country being raised in female same-sex households.

The families, with a variety of income levels, were drawn from a huge, continuing national family survey. The survey was random, and therefore unaffected by the sort of volunteer bias created when, say, families with good stories to tell respond to advertisements placed by investigators. In addition, the interviews were conducted by a team of government researchers who were interested in a wide array of social and demographic factors, all but eliminating the researcher bias that some critics point to. The survey's results, published in the journal Child Development, confirmed some previous findings: the 44 girls and boys were typical American teenagers, the researchers found, no more confused or moody than a comparison group of 44 peers from similar but traditional families.

"They even reported being more involved at school, in clubs, after-school activities, things like that," said the report's senior author, Dr. Charlotte Patterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. "I have no idea what that means, but we sure didn't expect it."